Inkscape 0.44 - Faster, Bigger, Better

bbyakk writes "After 6 months of development, Inkscape 0.44 is out. This version of the SVG-based vector graphics editor brings improved performance and tons of new features: Layers dialog, docked color palette, clipping and masking, native PDF export with transparency, configurable keyboard (including Xara emulation), Outline mode for complex drawings, innovative 'node sculpting' and lots more. Check out the full release notes, enjoy the screenshots, or download your package for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X."

No Packages yet

[vonFinkelstien]

They are waiting to "officially" announce the release when the packages are ready. You can download the tarball now, however.

Packages only availible on SourceForge

[onlysolution]

Be sure to use the link in the article to get the compiled packages, as the official site has not been updated with them yet.

Re:PDF Support

[MenTaLguY]

I have heard that this is the open source replacement for Adobe Acrobat.

You heard wrong. :)

We are going to continue to improve our PDF support, but it's not a central part of our mission. Also, whatever PDF support we have is going to be largely limited to that subset of PDF functionality which is representable in SVG.

Re:Firefox Users

[sankyuu]

I find native SVG rendering on firefox interesting, for instance this graphic of the Uluru [openclipart.org]. I still find it cool that you can click on the picture to view its source.

But since SVG needs the Adobe SVG plugin on IE, i usually draw my clipart in Inkscape or Sodipodi (i forgot which has better Japanese support) then export it to PNG.

I like plants

[Joebert]

I find the L-System Effects really intresting, I'll likely install the application just to play with thoose.

Re:Packages only availible on SourceForge

[Bryce]

'Tis updated now. We're still waiting on RPM and DEB packages. Gentoo users can get an ebuild here (if our wiki survives slashdot): http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/CompilingG entoo [inkscape.org]

Release Notes

[Anonymous Coward]

It took forever to load the release notes page. The google cache is over here http://google.com/search?q=cache:Zs9PSqgG0yoJ:wiki .inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ReleaseNotes+inkscape +release+notes [google.com]

Re:i dunno

[treeves]

I've used it since 0.41 and have been using the development pre-0.44 releases, no problem, WinXP on a ThinkPad. Even 0.43 is pretty cool. 0.44 adds some more functionality. Try it. You'll like it. It looks like the guy who reported it is Bulia Byak, one of the main developers. It's one of the top downloads on sourceforge.net.

Re:Tried it.

[MenTaLguY]

To be fair, most people never hand-edit AI files. It's more expected for SVG, though.

Inkscape _does_ let you manually reassign ids if you don't like the autogenerated ones, however.

Re:Firefox Users

[mh101]

Open Preferences, then go to Advanced, and General. Uncheck "Resize large images..." and FF will no longer shrink the images.

Red arrows?

[AxelBoldt]

So is inkscape finally able to produce a red arrow with a red tip? Up to now it was impossible.

Re:Damnit, Slashdotted in the middle of the night

[msloan]

Many crashes have been fixed in this version. As for the release notes, I can access them.

Verbatim from the wiki:

Speed

In addition to the Outline mode which makes it much easier to work with complex drawings, this version of Inkscape also provides significant speed improvements in many areas.

• Thanks to optimizations in the renderer, Inkscape's screen redraw is faster by at least 10%, and in some cases (such as complex stroked/dashed paths at high zooms) up to three times faster.
• Optimizations in the Node tool resulted in noticeable speed gains for node editing. Thus, switching to and from the Node tool (with a path selected), as well as selecting nodes in that tool, are now at least ten times faster than before. Other operations, including curve and node dragging and move/scale/rotate operations on multiple selected nodes, are much faster as well. This is especially important when working with complex paths; with these optimizations, paths containing several thousand nodes, though still slow, are much more usable.
• An optimization in the attribute setting method made operations such as moving multiple objects with arrow keys at least 30% faster compared to 0.43. This is especially noticeable when you are moving clones selected together with their original (e.g. a clone tiling), in which case Inkscape now works three to four times faster.
• Interface icons are now rendered in the background (from SVG source in share/icons/icons.svg) when Inkscape is idle, rather than waiting for all the icons in a menu to render the first time you pull it up. This eliminates the annoying delay when opening menus for the first time.
• Previously, zooming in to view a small portion of a path (especially big and complex path), there was a very noticeable slowdown and memory use increased dramatically. We optimized the renderer to only process the visible part of a path, and as a result the rendering speed is now almost the same at any zoom up to the maximum, providing up to 10-40 times speedup compared to the previous version (the closer is the zoom, the greater is the gain).
• The Path > Break Apart command is now dozens of times (up to 100x) faster for complex paths with thousands of subpaths.

bugfixes

• Reading a document with an incorrect namespace URI not only did not cause Inkscape to complain, but could also "pollute" Inkscape's internal namespace table, resulting in an "infection" of subsequently saved documents by the incorrect namespace. This is now fixed, but as a result, documents with incorrect namespace URIs will no longer load. You will have to edit them in a text editor to fix the namespaces.
• With newer versions of GTK, dragging with graphics tablet pen did not work in some tools and contexts (in particular, in Node and Rectangle tools). This is fixed.
• Scaling of objects with stroke in Selector used to cause undesired shifts of the scaled object, as well as scaling it in the dimension which was intended to remain untouched (e.g. slight change in width when you scale only height). All these problems are now fixed, both for interactive scaling by mouse and for numeric scaling via the Controls bar, and for both values of the "Scale stroke with objects" option. Among other things, this means that stroked objects no longer lose snapping on scale, and that the "Default scale origin" option in the Selector tool preferences finally works as designed. Caveat: There may still be problems if you scale a selection that contains objects with different stroke widths.
• Scaling of stroke now works for objects that didn't specify stroke-width; before, they always ended up with the default 1px stroke.
• The bounding box for text and flowed text objects did not include stroke width. This has been fixed.
• Stroke miterlimit on text objects was misinterpreted in absolute units instead of multiplies of stroke width (resulting in miter joins rendered as bevel).
• The

Re:Memory usage dialog

[MenTaLguY]

(Speaking as the person who wrote the memory dialog)

There's a memory leak in the memory dialog's treeview widget. I've not been able to track it down yet (it may be a gtkmm issue), but I think your guess is roughly correct.

Re:PDF Support

[MenTaLguY]

I've never used Acrobat, so I wouldn't know what to suggest. Depending on your needs, e.g. pdftk [accesspdf.com] may fit the bill. Generally it's better to look at the features you need and then search for a tool based on that, rather than looking for a 1:1 replacement for a particular application.

Re:Firefox Users

[MenTaLguY]

Seconded -- bitmap transformation/scaling has been done to death these days. It'd be insane not to use one of the many existing libraries out there -- and indeed, Firefox 3 will be using cairo for that purpose.

Re: game art

[mughi]

Could Inkscape be used to generate art for a videogame?

Yes. Depends on what and how you're planning to do things. The GNOME games migrated to SVG artwork quite a while back.

Another approach is to create your artwork in SVG and then render to bitmap at different sizes. This mirrors a lot of the workflow used for creating icons.

Are there any libraries to render this stuff?

As far as libraries go, there are librsvg [sourceforge.net] and KSVG [kde.org] for a start. For other gaming needs, one can do some interesting things with SVG and XHTML in a browser with a little JavaScript sprinkled in.

Re:Firefox Users

[dytin]

Firefox's default is to resize images. I agree though, it's an annoying "feature" and I wish that it weren't the default, especially since they use such a crappy resize algorigthm.

Re:Inkscape versus Xara?

[Anonymous Coward]

Xara still isn't in widespread use, if at all. Releasing source code is one thing, getting it to compile cleanly accross the board is something else and I suspect they are still some way from a stable release.

Inkscape is very good, especially so for pre 1.0 software. I previously used sodipodi extensively and was pretty worried about the inkscape fork, specifically the move to C++ and use of GC. Inkscape could have gone horribly wrong, fortunately the developers are delivering. Kudos and much thanks to them, it's a great app.

COMPLETELY OT: Does anybody know what happened to apng, the backwards compatible animated PNG spec proposed by the Mozilla guys? It was Vlad and Pav working on that IIRC and the big issue for the PNG folk was that the mime type should be x-video/png instead of image/png (rolls eyes - apparently animated images are videos now).

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fairly simple in Inkscape. Just import your favorite picture and do a trace bitmap with multiple scanning, color.

Re:Illustrator

[AC-x]

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK [w3.org]

It would have been a hideous omission not to include it in the standard, they'd never get anyone working in print to use SVGs without it.

Re:Illustrator

[bbyakk]

> I major feature that was missing is non-destructive shape unions, intersections and differences.

Non-destructive intersection is now possible, it's called clipping. Other types are not supported by SVG.

> Next major feature is an effects stack

We're working on that. Hopefully 0.45 will have this.

Re:Did anyone see this?!?!

[ScislaC]

Hehehehe... I can assure you that there was no bitmap tracing done whatsoever. My wife will confirm this as she watched me draw most of it from scratch (what she didn't watch was when I was on my lunch breaks at the office). I actually have a ton of progressional snapshots done during the creation, I need to string them together to show the process for people. It changed a LOT from beginning to end, and will change even more once we have SVG filters in place.

Re:Illustrator

[bbyakk]

One possibility is to wait for newer versions of SVG. Many good things are being added.

Another possibility is to implement something on top of SVG but in SVG-compatible way. For example, this is how we implement star shapes missing in SVG. This is not always possible, and even when it is, we do this only if it's something simple and limited (i.e. would not require pervasive changes across all of our codebase) or when the need for the feature is really very urgent. I may be wrong but to me, non-destructive unions or intersections do not seem to fall into any of these categories.

On the other hand, we have plans to implement "path effects" (non-destructive effects on shapes and paths) on top of SVG. This is relatively easy to do. Plus, in 0.45 we should have support for SVG filters, thanks to Google SoC.

Re:Red arrows?

[TheModelEskimo]

I just tried it. It works fine, and I'm sure it worked in previous versions as well:

1. Create normal arrow
2. Select the curve with the arrow point on it
3. Ctrl+Alt+C or Path --> Stroke to Path
4. Select the arrow tip in node selection mode and color it (both stroke and fill can be colored)
5. Thank you, drive through please.

Re:I call bullshit

[MenTaLguY]

Hmm, what did you think we meant by "node sculpting"? It's basically proportional node dragging with a pressure-sensitive falloff radius. You do find that in the mesh editors of a lot of 3d apps, but as far as I know it's the first time I've seen it in a 2d vector application.

Re:Glow Effect?

[MenTaLguY]

For now, you can sort of tediously fake it with a lot of transparent gradients -- otherwise, you'll have to wait for 0.45 to implement SVG filter effects, which are basically a whole suite of dynamic raster effects. I don't think any other vector application will have anything like it.

Re:Is the mega SVG file size solved in this releas

[MenTaLguY]

Have you tried saving as "Inkscape SVGZ" rather than "Inkscape SVG"? Raw SVG, being an XML dialect, is kinda verbose, so there's only so much we can do about that. SVGZ is gzip-compressed SVG, which is (slightly) more reasonable in filesize.

All that said, 20 MB is unusually large in my experience. What exactly do you have in mind when you say "medium-size"?

Re:CMYK

[mughi]

wrong wrong WRONG!

SVG does support CMYK [w3.org]

Actually, at the moment SVG doesn't support CMYK. However it is proposed that it will at some point. What you cited there was the proposed draft requirements from over four years ago. I think they might be getting close to finally putting 1.2 out, but even in the last rounds of finalizing SVG 1.1 they dropped things, so one mustn't count one's chickens before they're hatched.

In fact, back in April of 2005 they pulled back their draft 1.2 spec and replaced it with a simple placeholder [w3.org] stating that things were in flux. So we're all now just sitting, waiting with baited breath.

Re:Firefox Users

[Bryce]

That screenshot was made right after the word wrapping feature was implemented, and at the time it did have a tendancy to "lose" words around tight bends and such. There may still be a few glitches like this one in the word wrapping code, so please keep an eye out and report it (with sample file) where you find it.

Re:Illustrator

[Bryce]

The three things that have historically bugged me most about Inkscape have been the huge difficulty of locking/unlocking objects, the poor import/export of EPS and PDF, and the inability to add custom colors and gradients onto the swatch palette.

One of our top development priorities for 0.44 was a layer dialog; hopefully this will make doing things like locking/unlocking objects somewhat easier.

According to beta testers, due to a few fixes that were submitted by users, EPS and PDF are working more reliably, at least for common cases. Please submit bugs for any remaining issues - we have a summer of code student that will be focusing on improvements in this area for Inkscape.

The color palette is now dockable (one of the more noticeable changes), and it is also possible to bring in palettes from the GIMP (*.gpl files - place in your /usr/share/inkscape/palettes/ directory). More work is planned along these lines for the next release.

Re:Firefox Users

[BusterB]

I've been using the Firefox nightly build today (says it's 3.0a) - it supports smooth downsampling. The current Konqueror does too.

Re:Firefox Users

[Tack]

Agreed. Go vote for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98971 [mozilla.org] (note

Re:Inkscape versus Xara?

[Anonymous Coward]

The supposed bloat of MNG was less than the bloat of GIF.
There was a bug report which detailed how if the developers had replaced the gif inside Mozilla with and included MNG support it would actually save on disk usage.
so much for bloat!

When mozilla switched direction and became Firefox they just weren't interested in promoting a platform and open standards like MNG.